After English National Opera's astonishing revival of The Valkyrie last October, its new semi-staging of Wagner's Siegfried, the next instalment of the company's slowly unfolding Ring cycle, is something of a disappointment.
It is gravely hampered by an inadequate central performance from the American tenor Stephen O'Mara. The role of the eponymous hero, who initially knows no fear then discovers it with the first stirrings of sexuality, is the most taxing in the Wagnerian canon, and O'Mara seems miscast. Dramatically, he is just about plausible, in a dyed-blond, all-American-boy way - but he doesn't, to put it bluntly, make enough noise. His voice, bronzed in tone, has staying power but no weight. Most of the time the orchestra drowns him out. Stretches of the opera go for nothing and great performances elsewhere fail to draw it into a coherent whole.
Robert Hayward is both noble and self-lacerating as Wotan, the god exhausted by the failure of his own creation and now seeking annihilation. His singing, which in The Valkyrie was occasionally flawed by a disparity between lyricism and declamation, is now immaculately judged: there is despair in his characterisation as he fondles the anvil on which Siegfried will forge the sword that will break his power. He tellingly greets Patricia Bardon's beautiful Erda with a nostalgic look of desire - she was once his mistress, after all. John Graham-Hall, his voice stronger than O'Mara's, makes Mime a real slimeball, while Andrew Shore is a terrifying Alberich.
Conductor Paul Daniel pitches the score somewhere between fairy-tale and nightmare, though he also seems dependent on his cast to set the emotional tone of individual scenes. He is consequently at his finest in the dialectical showdowns between first Wotan and Mime, then Alberich and Erda, and in those passages in which Wagner tips into proto-expressionism to convey Mime's terrors.
The final duet, which pits O'Mara against Kathleen Broderick's Brünnhilde, is anticlimatic. Michael Walling's semi-staging does not have nearly the same force as did The Valkyrie, and the work, a supernatural tale rather than a psychodrama, doesn't ideally lend itself to such treatment. ENO has a way to go before the cycle is both musically complete and fully staged. One hopes that, perhaps with a different tenor, Siegfried might improve.
· Repeated at the Barbican, London EC2, on Saturday. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
